Hardware

Currently, the system is fully tetherless with wireless radio
connections allowing the user to roam around a significant amount of
space (i.e. a few office rooms). Plans for evolving the system into a
fully self-sufficient, compact and affordable form are underway. More
powerful video processing in commercial units such as the PC104
platform or the VIA platform would eventually facilitate this
process. However, for initial prototyping, a wireless system linked to
off board processing was acceptable.

Figure:
The Wearable Hardware System

Figure 5 depicts the major components of DyPERS which
are worn by the user during operation. The user dons a Sony GlassTron
heads-up display with a semi-transparent visor and
headphones. Attached to the visor is an ELMO video camera (with wide
angle lens) which is aligned as closely as possible with the user's
line of sight [Starner et al. ,
1997]. Thus the vision system is directed by
the user's head motions to interesting objects. In addition, a nearby
microphone is incorporated. The A/V data captured by the camera and
microphone is continuously broadcast using a wireless radio
transmitter. This wireless transmission connects the user and the
wearable system to an SGI O2 workstation where the vision and other
aspects of the system operate. The workstation collects the A/V data
into clips, scans the visual scene using the object recognition
system, and transmits the appropriate A/V clips back to the user. The
clips are the rendered as an overlay via the user's GlassTron. Two A/V
wireless channels are used at all times for a bidirectional real-time
connection (user to SGI and SGI to user) [Mann, 1996].